“I want to know all about the County,” she said, beaming upon him. “India and Honey are such poor correspondents, and I know you know everything that goes on down there. Do tell us about Joe Fontaine’s wedding.”
Gerald warmed to the flattery and said that the wedding had been a quiet affair, “not like you girls had,” for Joe had only a few days’ furlough. Sally, the little Munroe chit, looked very pretty. No, he couldn’t recall what she wore but he did hear that she didn’t have a “second-day” dress.
“She didn’t!” exclaimed the girls, scandalized.
“Sure, because she didn’t have a second day,” Gerald explained and bawled with laughter before recalling that perhaps such remarks were not fit for female ears. Scarlett’s spirits soared at his laugh and she blessed Melanie’s tact.
“Back Joe went to Virginia the next day,” Gerald added hastily. “There was no visiting about and dancing afterwards. The Tarleton twins are home.”
“We heard that. Have they recovered?”
“They weren’t badly wounded. Stuart had it in the knee and a minie ball went through Brent’s shoulder. You had it, too, that they were mentioned in dispatches for bravery?”
“No! Tell us!”
“Hare brained-both of them. I’m believing there’s Irish in them,” said Gerald complacently. “I forget what they did, but Brent is a lieutenant now.”
Scarlett felt pleased at hearing of their exploits, pleased in a proprietary manner. Once a man had been her beau, she never lost the conviction that he belonged to her, and all his good deeds redounded to her credit.
“And I’ve news that’ll be holding the both of you,” said Gerald. “They’re saying Stu is courting at Twelve Oaks again.”
“Honey or India?” questioned Melly excitedly, while Scarlett stared almost indignantly.
“Oh, Miss India, to be sure. Didn’t she have him fast till this baggage of mine winked at him?”
“Oh,” said Melly, somewhat embarrassed at Gerald’s outspokenness.
“And more than that, young Brent has taken to hanging about Tara. Now!”
Scarlett could not speak. The defection of her beaux was almost insulting. Especially when she recalled how wildly both the twins had acted when she told them she was going to marry Charles. Stuart had even threatened to shoot Charles, or Scarlett, or himself, or all three. It had been most exciting.
“Suellen?” questioned Melly, breaking into a pleased smile. “But I thought Mr. Kennedy-”
“Oh, him?” said Gerald. “Frank Kennedy still pussyfoots about, afraid of his shadow, and I’ll be asking him his intentions soon if he doesn’t speak up. No, ’tis me baby.”
“Carreen?”
“She’s nothing but a child!” said Scarlett sharply, finding her tongue.
“She’s little more than a year younger than you were, Miss, when you were married,” retorted Gerald. “Is it you’re grudging your old beau to your sister?”
Melly blushed, unaccustomed to such frankness, and signaled Peter to bring in the sweet potato pie. Frantically she cast about in her mind for some other topic of conversation which would not be so personal but which would divert Mr. O’Hara from the purpose of his trip. She could think of nothing but, once started, Gerald needed no stimulus other than an audience. He talked on about the thievery of the commissary department which every month increased its demands, the knavish stupidity of Jefferson Davis and the blackguardery of the Irish who were being enticed into the Yankee army by bounty money.
When the wine was on the table and the two girls rose to leave him, Gerald cocked a severe eye at his daughter from under frowning brows and commanded her presence alone for a few minutes. Scarlett cast a despairing glance at Melly, who twisted her handkerchief helplessly and went out, softly pulling the sliding doors together.
“How now, Missy!” bawled Gerald, pouring himself a glass of port. “’Tis a fine way to act! Is it another husband you’re trying to catch and you so fresh a widow?”
“Not so loud, Pa, the servants-”
“They know already, to be sure, and everybody knows of our disgrace. And your poor mother taking to her bed with it and me not able to hold up me head. ’tis shameful. No, Puss, you need not think to get around me with tears this time,” he said hastily and with some panic in his voice as Scarlett’s lids began to bat and her mouth to screw up. “I know you. You’d be flirting at the wake of your husband. Don’t cry. There, I’ll be saying no more tonight, for I’m going to see this fine Captain Butler who makes so light of me daughter’s reputation. But in the morning-There now, don’t cry. Twill do you no good at all, at all. ’tis firm that I am and back to Tara you’ll be going tomorrow before you’re disgracing the lot of us again. Don’t cry, pet. Look what I’ve brought you! Isn’t that a pretty present? See, look! How could you be putting so much trouble on me, bringing me all the way up here when ’tis a busy man I am? Don’t cry!”
Melanie and Pittypat had gone to sleep hours before, but Scarlett lay awake in the warm darkness, her heart heavy and frightened in her breast. To leave Atlanta when life had just begun again and go home and face Ellen! She would rather die than face her mother. She wished she were dead, this very minute, then everyone would be sorry they had been so hateful. She turned and tossed on the hot pillow until a noise far up the quiet street reached her ears. It was an oddly familiar noise, blurred and indistinct though it was. She slipped out of bed and went to the window. The street with its over-arching trees was softly, deeply black under a dim star-studded sky. The noise came closer, the sound of wheels, the plod of a horse’s hooves and voices. And suddenly she grinned for, as a voice thick with brogue and whisky came to her, raised in “Peg in a Low-backed Car,” she knew. This might not be Jonesboro on Court Day, but Gerald was coming home in the same condition.
She saw the dark bulk of a buggy stop in front of the house and indistinct figures alight. Someone was with him. Two figures paused at the gate and she heard the click of the latch and Gerald’s voice came plain,
“Now I’ll be giving you the ‘Lament for Robert Emmet.’ ’tis a song you should be knowing, me lad. I’ll teach it to you.”
“I’d like to learn it,” replied his companion, a hint of buried laughter in his flat drawling voice. “But not now, Mr. O’Hara.”
“Oh, my God, it’s that hateful Butler man!” thought Scarlett, at first annoyed. Then she took heart. At least they hadn’t shot each other. And they must be on amicable terms to be coming home together at this hour and in this condition.
“Sing it I will and listen you will or I’ll be shooting you for the Orangeman you are.”
“Not Orangeman-Charlestonian.”
“’Tis no better. ’tis worse. I have two sister-in-laws in Charleston and I know.”
“Is he going to tell the whole neighborhood?” thought Scarlett panic-stricken, reaching for her wrapper. But what could she do? She couldn’t go downstairs at this hour of the night and drag her father in from the street.
With no further warning, Gerald, who was hanging on the gate, threw back his head and began the “Lament,” in a roaring bass. Scarlett rested her elbows on the window sill and listened, grinning unwillingly. It would be a beautiful song, if only her father could carry a tune. It was one of her favorite songs and, for a moment, she followed the fine melancholy of those verses beginning:
“She is far from the land where her young hero sleeps And lovers are round her sighing.”
The song went on and she heard stirrings in Pittypat’s and Melly’s rooms. Poor things, they’d certainly be upset. They were not used to full-blooded males like Gerald. When the song had finished, two forms merged into one, came up the walk and mounted the steps. A discreet knock sounded at the door.
“I suppose I must go down,” thought Scarlett. “After all he’s my father and poor Pitty would die before she’d go.” Besides, she didn’t want the servants to see Gerald in his present condition. And if Peter tried to put him to bed, he might get unruly. Pork was the only one who knew how to handle him.
She pinned the wrapper close about her throat, lit her bedside candle and hurried down the dark stairs into the front hall. Setting the candle on the stand, she unlocked the door and in the wavering light she saw Rhett Butler, not a ruffle disarranged, supporting her small, thickset father. The “Lament” had evidently been Gerald’s swan song for he was frankly hanging onto his companion’s arm. His hat was gone, his crisp long hair was tumbled in a white mane, his cravat was under one ear, and there were liquor stains down his shirt bosom.
“Your father, I believe?” said Captain Butler, his eyes amused in his swarthy face. He took in her dishabille in one glance that seemed to penetrate through her wrapper.
“Bring him in,” she said shortly, embarrassed at her attire, infuriated at Gerald for putting her in a position where this man could laugh at her.
Rhett propelled Gerald forward. “Shall I help you take him upstairs? You cannot manage him. He’s quite heavy.”
Her mouth fell open with horror at the audacity of his proposal. Just imagine what Pittypat and Melly cowering in their beds would think, should Captain Butler come upstairs!
“Mother of God, no! In here, in the parlor on that settee.”
“The suttee, did you say?”
“I’ll thank you to keep a civil tongue in your head. Here. Now lay him down.”
“Shall I take off his boots?”
“No. He’s slept in them before.”
She could have bitten off her tongue for that slip, for he laughed softly as he crossed Gerald’s legs.
“Please go, now.”
He walked out into the dim hall and picked up the hat he had dropped on the doorsill.
“I will be seeing you Sunday at dinner,” he said and went out, closing the door noiselessly behind him.
Scarlett arose at five-thirty, before the servants had come in from the back yard to start breakfast, and slipped down the steps to the quiet lower floor. Gerald was awake, sitting on the sofa, his hands gripping his bullet head as if he wished to crush it between his palms. He looked up furtively as she entered. The pain of moving his eyes was too excruciating to be borne and he groaned.
“Wurra the day!”
“It’s a fine way you’ve acted, Pa,” she began in a furious whisper. “Coming home at such an hour and waking all the neighbors with your singing.”
“I sang?”
“Sang! You woke the echoes singing the ‘Lament.”
“’Tis nothing I’m remembering.”
“The neighbors will remember it till their dying day and so will Miss Pittypat and Melanie.”
“Mother of Sorrows,” moaned Gerald, moving a thickly furred tongue around parched lips. “’Tis little I’m remembering after the game started.”
“Game?”
“That laddybuck Butler bragged that he was the best poker player in-”
“How much did you lose?”
“Why, I won, naturally. A drink or two helps me game.”
“Look in your wallet.”
As if every movement was agony, Gerald removed his wallet from his coat and opened it. It was empty and he looked at it in forlorn bewilderment.
“Five hundred dollars,” he said. “And ‘twas to buy things from the blockaders for Mrs. O’Hara, and now not even fare left to Tara.”
As she looked indignantly at the empty purse, an idea took form in Scarlett’s mind and grew swiftly.
“I’ll not be holding up my head in this town,” she began. “You’ve disgraced us all.”
“Hold your tongue, Puss. Can you not see me head is bursting?”
“Coming home drunk with a man like Captain Butler, and singing at the top of your lungs for everyone to hear and losing all that money.”
“The man is too clever with cards to be a gentleman. He-”
“What will Mother say when she hears?”
He looked up in sudden anguished apprehension. “You wouldn’t be telling your mother a word and upsetting her, now would you?”
Scarlett said nothing but pursed her lips.
“Think now how ‘twould hurt her and her so gentle.”
“And to think, Pa, that you said only last night I had disgraced the family! Me, with my poor little dance to make money for the soldiers. Oh, I could cry.”
“Well, don’t,” pleaded Gerald. “’Twould be more than me poor head could stand and sure ’tis bursting now.”
“And you said that I-”
“Now Puss, now Puss, don’t you be hurt at what your poor old father said and him not meaning a thing and not understanding a thing! Sure, you’re a fine well-meaning girl, I’m sure.”
“And wanting to take me home in disgrace.”
“Ah, darling, I wouldn’t be doing that. ‘Twas to tease you. You won’t be mentioning the money to your mother and her in a flutter about expenses already?”
“No,” said Scarlett frankly, “I won’t, if you’ll let me stay here and if you’ll tell Mother that ‘twas nothing but a lot of gossip from old cats.”
Gerald looked mournfully at his daughter.
“’Tis blackmail, no less.”
“And last night was a scandal, no less.”
“Well,” he began wheedlingly, “we’ll be forgetting all that. And do you think a fine pretty lady like Miss Pittypat would be having any brandy in the house? The hair of the dog-”
Scarlett turned and tiptoed through the silent hall into the dining room to get the brandy bottle that she and Melly privately called the “swoon bottle” because Pittypat always took a sip from it when her fluttering heart made her faint-or seem to faint. Triumph was written on her face and no trace of shame for her unfilial treatment of Gerald. Now Ellen would be soothed with lies if any other busybody wrote her. Now she could stay in Atlanta. Now she could do almost as she pleased, Pittypat being the weak vessel that she was. She unlocked the cellaret and stood for a moment with the bottle and glass pressed to her bosom.
She saw a long vista of picnics by the bubbling waters of Peachtree Creek and barbecues at Stone Mountain, receptions and balls, afternoon danceables, buggy rides and Sunday-night buffet suppers. She would be there, right in the heart of things, right in the center of a crowd of men. And men fell in love so easily, after you did little things for them at the hospital. She wouldn’t mind the hospital so much now. Men were so easily stirred when they had been ill. They fell into a clever girl’s hand just like the ripe peaches at Tara when the trees were gently shaken.
She went back toward her father with the reviving liquor, thanking Heaven that the famous O’Hara head had not been able to survive last night’s bout and wondering suddenly if Rhett Butler had had anything to do with that.
Chapter XI
On an afternoon of the following week, Scarlett came home from the hospital weary and indignant. She was tired from standing on her feet all morning and irritable because Mrs. Merriwether had scolded her sharply for sitting on a soldier’s bed while she dressed his wounded arm. Aunt Pitty and Melanie, bonneted in their best, were on the porch with Wade and Prissy, ready for their weekly round of calls. Scarlett asked to be excused from accompanying them and went upstairs to her room.
When the last sound of carriage wheels had died away and she knew the family was safely out of sight, she slipped quietly into Melanie’s room and turned the key in the lock. It was a prim, virginal little room and it lay still and warm in the slanting rays of the four-o’clock sun. The floors were glistening and bare except for a few bright rag rugs, and the white walls unornamented save for one corner which Melanie had fitted up as a shrine.
Here, under a draped Confederate flag, hung the gold-hilted saber that Melanie’s father had carried in the Mexican War, the same saber Charles had worn away to war. Charles’ sash and pistol belt hung there too, with his revolver in the holster. Between the saber and the pistol was a daguerreotype of Charles himself, very stiff and proud in his gray uniform, his great brown eyes shining out of the frame and a shy smile on his lips.
Scarlett did not even glance at the picture but went unhesitatingly across the room to the square rosewood writing box that stood on the table beside the narrow bed. From it she took a pack of letters tied together with a blue ribbon, addressed in Ashley’s hand to Melanie. On the top was the letter which had come that morning and this one she opened.
When Scarlett first began secretly reading these letters, she had been so stricken of conscience and so fearful of discovery she could hardly open the envelopes for trembling. Now, her nevertoo-scrupulous sense of honor was dulled by repetition of the offense and even fear of discovery had subsided. Occasionally, she thought with a sinking heart, “What would Mother say if she knew?” She knew Ellen would rather see her dead than know her guilty of such dishonor. This had worried Scarlett at first, for she still wanted to be like her mother in every respect. But the temptation to read the letters was too great and she put the thought of Ellen out of her mind. She had become adept at putting unpleasant thoughts out of her mind these days. She had learned to say, “I won’t think of this or that bothersome thought now. I’ll think about it tomorrow.” Generally when tomorrow came, the thought either did not occur at all or it was so attenuated by the delay it was not very troublesome. So the matter of Ashley’s letters did not lie very heavily on her conscience.
Melanie was always generous with the letters, reading parts of them aloud to Aunt Pitty and Scarlett. But it was the part she did not read that tormented Scarlett, that drove her to surreptitious reading of her sister-in-law’s mail. She had to know if Ashley had come to love his wife since marrying her. She had to know if he even pretended to love her. Did he address tender endearments to her? What sentiments did he express and with what warmth?
She carefully smoothed out the letter.
Ashley’s small even writing leaped up at her as she read, “My dear wife,” and she breathed in relief. He wasn’t calling Melanie “Darling” or “Sweetheart” yet.
“My Dear wife: You write me saying you are alarmed lest I be concealing my real thoughts from you and you ask me what is occupying my mind these days-”
“Mother of God!” thought Scarlett, in a panic of guilt. “’Concealing his real thoughts.’ Can Melly have read his mind? Or my mind? Does she suspect that he and I-”
Her hands trembled with fright as she held the letter closer, but as she read the next paragraph she relaxed.
“Dear Wife, if I have concealed aught from you it is because I did not wish to lay a burden on your shoulders, to add to your worries for my physical safety with those of my mental turmoil. But I can keep nothing from you, for you know me too well. Do not be alarmed. I have no wound. I have not been ill. I have enough to eat and occasionally a bed to sleep in. A soldier can ask for no more. But, Melanie, heavy thoughts lie on my heart and I will open my heart to you.
“These summer nights I lie awake, long after the camp is sleeping, and I look up at the stars and, over and over, I wonder, ‘Why are you here, Ashley Wilkes? What are you fighting for?’”
“Not for honor and glory, certainly. War is a dirty business and I do not like dirt. I am not a soldier and I have no desire to seek the bubble reputation even in the cannon’s mouth. Yet, here I am at the wars-whom God never intended to be other than a studious country gentleman. For, Melanie, bugles do not stir my blood nor drums entice my feet and I see too clearly that we have been betrayed, betrayed by our arrogant Southern selves, believing that one of us could whip a dozen Yankees, believing that King Cotton could rule the world. Betrayed, too, by words and catch phrases, prejudices and hatreds coming from the mouths of those highly placed, those men whom we respected and revered-’King Cotton, Slavery, States’ Rights, Damn Yankees.”
“And so when I lie on my blanket and look up at the stars and say ‘What are you fighting for?’ I think of States’ Rights and cotton and the darkies and the Yankees whom we have been bred to hate, and I know that none of these is the reason why I am fighting. Instead, I see Twelve Oaks and remember how the moonlight slants across the white columns, and the unearthly way the magnolias look, opening under the moon, and how the climbing roses make the side porch shady even at the hottest noon. And I see Mother, sewing there, as she did when I was a little boy. And I hear the darkies coming home across the fields at dusk, tired and singing and ready for supper, and the sound of the windlass as the bucket goes down into the cool well. And there’s the long view down the road to the river, across the cotton fields, and the mist rising from the bottom lands in the twilight. And that is why I’m here who have no love of death or misery or glory and no hatred for anyone. Perhaps that is what is called patriotism, love of home and country. But Melanie, it goes deeper than that. For, Melanie, these things I have named are but the symbols of the thing for which I risk my life, symbols of the kind of life I love. For I am fighting for the old days, the old ways I love so much but which, I fear, are now gone forever, no matter how the die may fall. For, win or lose, we lose just the same.
“If we win this war and have the Cotton Kingdom of our dreams, we still have lost, for we will become a different people and the old quiet ways will go. The world will be at our doors clamoring for cotton and we can command our own price. Then, I fear, we will become like the Yankees, at whose money-making activities, acquisitiveness and commercialism we now sneer. And if we lose, Melanie, if we lose!
“I am not afraid of danger or capture or wounds or even death, if death must come, but I do fear that once this war is over, we will never get back to the old times. And I belong in those old times. I do not belong in this mad present of killing and I fear I will not fit into any future, try though I may. Nor will you, my dear, for you and I are of the same blood. I do not know what the future will bring, but it cannot be as beautiful or as satisfying as the past.
“I lie and look at the boys sleeping near me and I wonder if the twins or Alex or Cade think these same thoughts. I wonder if they know they are fighting for a Cause that was lost the minute the first shot was fired, for our Cause is really our own way of living and that is gone already. But I do not think they think these things and they are lucky.
“I had not thought of this for us when I asked you to marry me. I had thought of life going on at Twelve Oaks as it had always done, peacefully, easily, unchanging. We are alike, Melanie, loving the same quiet things, and I saw before us a long stretch of uneventful years in which to read, hear music and dream. But not this! Never this! That this could happen to us all, this wrecking of old ways, this bloody slaughter and hate! Melanie, nothing is worth it-States’ Rights, nor slaves, nor cotton. Nothing is worth what is happening to us now and what may happen, for if the Yankees whip us the future will be one of incredible horror. And, my dear, they may yet whip us.
“I should not write those words. I should not even think them. But you have asked me what was in my heart, and the fear of defeat is there. Do you remember at the barbecue, the day our engagement was announced, that a man named Butler, a Charlestonian by his accent, nearly caused a fight by his remarks about the ignorance of Southerners? Do you recall how the twins wanted to shoot him because he said we had few foundries and factories, mills and ships, arsenals and machine shops? Do you recall how he said the Yankee fleet could bottle us up so tightly we could not ship out our cotton? He was right. We are fighting the Yankees’ new rifles with Revolutionary War muskets, and soon the blockade will be too tight for even medical supplies to slip in. We should have paid heed to cynics like Butler who knew, instead of statesmen who felt-and talked. He said, in effect, that the South had nothing with which to wage war but cotton and arrogance. Our cotton is worthless and what he called arrogance is all that is left. But I call that arrogance matchless courage. If-”
But Scarlett carefully folded up the letter without finishing it and thrust it back into the envelope, too bored to read further. Besides, the tone of the letter vaguely depressed her with its foolish talk of defeat. After all, she wasn’t reading Melanie’s mail to learn Ashley’s puzzling and uninteresting ideas. She had had to listen to enough of them when he sat on the porch at Tara in days gone by.
All she wanted to know was whether he wrote impassioned letters to his wife. So far he had not. She had read every letter in the writing box and there was nothing in any one of them that a brother might not have written to a sister. They were affectionate, humorous, discursive, but not the letters of a lover. Scarlett had received too many ardent love letters herself not to recognize the authentic note of passion when she saw it. And that note was missing. As always after her secret readings, a feeling of smug satisfaction enveloped her, for she felt certain that Ashley still loved her. And always she wondered sneeringly why Melanie did not realize that Ashley only loved her as a friend. Melanie evidently found nothing lacking in her husband’s messages but Melanie had had no other man’s love letters with which to compare Ashley’s.”
“He writes such crazy letters,” Scarlett thought. “If ever any husband of mine wrote me such twaddle-twaddle, he’d certainly hear from me! Why, even Charlie wrote better letters than these.”
She flipped back the edges of the letters, looking at the dates, remembering their contents. In them there were no fine descriptive pages of bivouacs and charges such as Darcy Meade wrote his parents or poor Dallas McLure had written his old-maid sisters, Misses Faith and Hope. The Meades and McLures proudly read these letters all over the neighborhood, and Scarlett had frequently felt a secret shame that Melanie had no such letters from Ashley to read aloud at sewing circles.
It was as though when writing Melanie, Ashley tried to ignore the war altogether, and sought to draw about the two of them a magic circle of timelessness, shutting out everything that had happened since Fort Sumter was the news of the day. It was almost as if he were trying to believe there wasn’t any war. He wrote of books which he and Melanie had read and songs they had sung, of old friends they knew and places he had visited on his Grand Tour. Through the letters ran a wistful yearning to be back home at Twelve Oaks, and for pages he wrote of the hunting and the long rides through the still forest paths under frosty autumn stars, the barbecues, the fish fries, the quiet of moonlight nights and the serene charm of the old house.
She thought of his words in the letter she had just read: “Not this! Never this!” and they seemed to cry of a tormented soul facing something he could not face, yet must face. It puzzled her for, if he was not afraid of wounds and death, what was it he feared? Unanalytical, she struggled with the complex thought.
“The war disturbs him and he-he doesn’t like things that disturb him… Me, for instance… He loved me but he was afraid to marry me because-for fear I’d upset his way of thinking and living. No, it wasn’t exactly that he was afraid. Ashley isn’t a coward. He couldn’t be when he’s been mentioned in dispatches and when Colonel Sloan wrote that letter to Melly all about his gallant conduct in leading the charge. Once he’s made up his mind to do something, no one could be braver or more determined but-He lives inside his head instead of outside in the world and he hates to come out into the world and-Oh, I don’t know what it is! If I’d just understood this one thing about him years ago, I know he’d have married me.”
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